Week in Review – 6 September 2013

New Information Gateway Librarians Hired

We are pleased to be bringing on three librarians into our Information Gateway division in the next several weeks. Karen Shea and Darrell Hankins will be transitioning from their current positions in Access Services into Information Gateway where they will continue providing reference and liaison support. They will continue to provide some support in Access Services as well through the transition and as we work to announce and hire two new librarians for Access Services to replace them.

Also joining us will be Mr. Thomas Lynch, who currently works as a Technical Information Specialist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Once the new staff is in place we will revisit our liaison assignments to accommodate our personnel changes.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the recruitment process, especially Dan Pritchard and Laura Mosher who helped with telephone interviews.

USMA Library Events

The events below will likely affect USMA Library and Jefferson Hall operations in the coming week.

Date

USMA

O/DEAN

USMA Library

Jefferson Hall

Hours

Friday
6 September 2013

Week in Review

0700-1630

Saturday
7 September 2013

Cadets Against Sexual Harassment and Assault

0900-1700

Sunday
8 September 2013

Branch Week

1100-2245

Monday
9 September 2013

Branch Week

Dean’s Brief to Faculty and Staff

Branch Week Social

0700-2245

Tuesday
10 September 2013

Branch Week

Division Heads

0700-2245

Wednesday
11 September 2013

Branch Week / Nininger Award

0700-2245

Thursday
12 September 2013

Branch Week

Dean’s Staff Meeting

0700-2245

Friday
13 September 2013

Branch Week / Modified Class Day / Beat Stanford / ’73 & ’83 Reunions

Week in Review

Army Film Crew in Jefferson Hall

0700-1530

USMA Library Metrics

USMA Library tracks a number of key statistics to measure service levels. These are their stories …

5AUG-11AUG

12AUG-18AUG

19AUG-25AUG

26AUG-1SEP

Access Services

Items Charged Out

221

197

268

445

Gate Count

N/A

N/A

N/A

3,927

Administrative Services

DV Tours

0

0

0

0

Significant Events Hosted

0

2

0

1

Events/Meetings Attended

18

22

22

14

Information Gateway

Reference Questions

8

8

30

31

Library Instruction Sessions

0

0

1

10

Cadets Attending Sessions

0

0

20

195

Materials Processing

Items Added – Books

17

26

36

145

Items Added – Digital

0

0

1,816

1

Items Added – GovDocs

112

62

40

177

Items Added – Other

0

40

238

2

Continuing Resource Check-Ins

152

58

63

74

Special Collections & Archives

Reference Inquiries

0

0

3

29

Research Visits < 1 hour

0

0

4

7

Research Visits < 1 day

0

0

1

1

Research Visits > 1 day

0

0

0

0

Instruction Sessions

0

0

2

7

Cadets Taught

0

0

41

114

Systems Management

Library Home Page Visits

822

1,589

2,426

2,770

LibGuides Visits

184

247

262

482

Digital Collections Visits

105

114

295

262

Facebook Visits

16

19

16

31

Public Printer Prints

0

6,448

13,373

6,510

Public Printer Copies

0

75

330

336

Public Printer Scans

4

14

129

173

Food for Thought

A few quotations from the past week about libraries, information, technology, and the future

“I’m not saying Google is evil — they’re not,” said Soghoian. “But they’re an advertising company. The wolf is providing the tools to the sheep.” Schneier concurs: “There’s a lot of tech you can bring to bear — but remember, the business model of the Internet is surveillance.” He suggests the solution does not lie in a technological breakthrough or even simple consumer awareness. “This is not a technical problem,” he said. “This is a legal problem.” – ‘Perfect privacy’? In Internet communication, that doesn’t exist – NBC News.com

“Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.” – Woody Allen

“Online shopping in general isn’t killing the great American mall, Amazon.com is — singlehandedly so. The Internet retailer sells more stuff online than its 12 biggest competitors combined, all of which move an incredibly tiny amount of stuff through their online storefronts, according to new documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission obtained by The Wall Street Journal’s Shelly Banji and Paul Ziobro. Companies like Target, Wal-Mart, and PetSmart have all reported huge growth rates in their online sales, but only because their businesses are growing from very small figures.” – The Only Place People Shop Online Is Amazon – Rebecca Greenfield – The Atlantic Wire

“In the future, e-books are going to explode beyond just containing stories, becoming niche social networks where we discuss our favorite passages with other readers and even authors and publishers buy our data to make more informed decisions. So hold on tight, book lovers. Reading as we know it will soon change, forever.” – E-Books Could Be The Future Of Social Media ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code community

“According to the proposed policies, Facebook will be able to analyze your profile photo and use it to suggest “tags” of you in other photographs. It’s a change from the current implementation, in which Facebook’s tagging suggestions only can use other photographs in which you’re already tagged — now, it’ll proactively be analyzing your profile picture to help make better suggestions. It’s not a surprising addition, as Facebook has been interested in facial-recognition technology for some time, but we imagine there will be a subset of users who’ll turn this “feature” off immediately.” – Facebook privacy update lets the social network analyze your profile picture | The Verge

“If I could change one thing about engineering education — well, actually, all education — it would be to center it around solving real problems and making things. In other words, we ought to be creating innovators and inventors at our engineering schools. They need to be able to do something more than solve theoretical problems when they leave us. In other words, they should learn how to be an applied problem solver, which is not the same thing as being a fantastic book-based equation solver. None of us learned how to do anything well by being talked at — it’s boring. We learn best by doing — getting our hands dirty and making our own mistakes.” – Ideas for Improving Science Education in the U.S. – NYTimes.com

“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” – James Joyce

“I’ve said no, because I think that it’s an excuse for state legislatures to cut funding to state universities,” Mr. Duneier says. “And I guess that I’m really uncomfortable being part of a movement that’s going to get its revenue in that way. And I also have serious doubts about whether or not using a course like mine in that way would be pedagogically effective.” – A MOOC Star Defects, at Least for Now – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education

“This is a canny economic move by Bezos and Amazon, of course — it’s not do-good charity meant to incite literacy and save the publishing industry. MatchBook takes advantage of the giant purchase history that Amazon has for all of its customers, and encourages those customers to buy (and, incidentally, to read) more. It also takes advantage of a new and nervous mega-literacy. That mega-literacy, in which driving-while-texting is a common and fatal practice, is predicated on the idea that we must always be reading. This obsession is akin to the delusion (and actively-promoted illusion) of food scarcity that has led, in part, to American overconsumption of food for 40 years. What does it mean to read—and screen—too much? At the biological and ethical level, we’re only now finding out. Hypotheses—alarmist, optimistic and otherwise—abound. At the economic level, it means that we’re buying copies of books we already have—suffusing our screens and bookshelves, along with our pantries, with hopeful redundancies, with stuff we don’t need. Hoarding stuff, both binary and tactile. Increasing the clog, not diminishing it. You know, the American way.” – Jeff Bezos, Kindle Matchbook and the American literacy epidemic – Yahoo! News

Excerpted from Infoneer Pulse, a digital commonplace book curated by Christopher Barth.